We could have a framed picture of a cartoon penguin that states it has been the employee of the month since CM started? A sense of humour helps.

28/09/2009

Marketing (2)

Add a shop where you can buy memorabilia from the main web page. After all everyone wants a 20 foot penguin guarding their car? We could start off with stickers and magnets etc. Not sure who's best to discuss this idea with?

28/09/2009

Marketing

One of the things that Open Source software providers tend to do is to forget the importance of marketing. This was made clear in a presentation in the Telheiras exposition. Creating a mechanism for user based content that promotes open-source software would be interesting. Eg. Prizes to graphic design artists who can come up with backgrounds for the open source community or think of viral schemes or something?

Caixa Magica's Winter of Programming... Not at all like Google's Summer of Code.

28/09/2009

Linux for Parents Mode (LPM)

Linux content control features and lock down mode so that kids can only use a browser that uses a locked password that cannot be disabled without first logging in as a parent. Lots of parents pay money for these features in Windows. Must be some open source content filtering out there?

28/09/2009

Linux for Mum mode (LMM)

One of the nice features with many new netbooks is a very simple layout that has just simple large buttons and large text. One of the nice things would be to be able to have an application that auto-starts similar to MythTV that comes up with a simple XML based user interface that is customisable and has links to other templates, hosted on the Caixa Magica website. Choose a template or make your own.

28/09/2009

If you can't beat them, join them

Linux developer network has a category for brainstorming and they have a top 10 ideas list as voted for by developers and members of the group.

In Windows there are lots of applications that come bundled with various mobile phones that allow features such as modem connections, file transfer etc. There may exist a mobile phone connector application but I have not heard of a universal one that allows for all types of phones. Normally limited to certain types if at all. The idea is to have an application that loads up XML profiles of phones and their features and then using drivers that others have made, connect to the phone and use their features as you would in Windows.

21/09/2009

Popularity Context

A list of the most downloaded packages from our repositories.

21/09/2009

Computer Janitor

A little app that finds files not used (.rpmnew, .rpmsave, rpm's no longer in use like old kernels)

Using a thumbdrive that is formatted in a particular way, there should be an option to set configurations of commonly used applications to use the settings on the drive. Even more interesting would be if these changes use a cvs-style system, so if working on multiple computers the settings can be copied and merged from multiple machines. The main part of this idea is to have the desktop preferences, email settings, browser bookmarks organised in one location. More advanced would be to have a redundant system where each thumb drive can act as master and any PC with enough resources will store the settings per device and can be merged/copied etc.

21/09/2009

Power Management Features for Laptop

One of the things that Windows PCs tend to be able to do more effectively than Linux computers is manage the ACPI system. A lack of drivers and configurations means that standard PCs will not use additional sleep states that are usually available on modern PCs and hence lose any green credentials that the manufacturers may have developed. By thinking about the ACPI system we may be able to save some computer cycles, a little bit of energy and if enough people do it, possibly save the world

14/09/2009

Flip uvcvideo kernel driver image

Many laptops have webcam's that use the uvcvideo module. However some of them have the camera placed upside down and the image must be flipped through the software driver. This can be achieved right now by using a patch that replaces/adds some code in the driver source code, but then the image will be flipped for the other users. The objective is add an option to the module that makes it easier to flip the image. Something like: "modprobe uvcvideo flip=yes". V4l does this now through software, but your notebook model must be known by the v4l database.

The KDE wallet windows appears every time we need to authenticate in an application (KMail, Kopete, etc), we should only need to give our password once, and at least for an hour every applications that needs it should user the stored password in a session and not "annoy" the user asking repeatedly for the password.In fact this is done under system settings -> advanced -> kde wallet. Can configure it there. Other possibility is to allow the user to change the default value when kde wallet is first used?

14/09/2009

Simple computer information window

There should be a simple applications that just showed the hardware of the machine in a simple and direct way. It could just show the architecture, processor, ram and disk partitions and space.

14/09/2009

Fingerprint biometric

On the T500 (and similar) Lenovo laptops there are optional fingerprint readers that currently do not work with Linux. It uses the Authentec 2810 reader which is currently unsupported by the driver fprint.